In the middle of Tennessee, there's a place that feels far removed from city living.
It's called Coffey County, and my colleague Cam McWhirter recently traveled there.
It's extremely rural.
There's a lot of farms that are sort of low rolling hills.
There's a lot of cattle.
There's a lot of corn being grown.
Very bucolic setting.
But not far from Coffee County, there are urban centers that are growing quickly.
It is on the road between Nashville and Chattanooga, Tennessee, and north of Huntsville,
Alabama, which is a big booming part of the South as well.
In recent years, that boom has been spilling beyond those city boundaries.
And for a while, it seemed like Coffee County was poised to take on some of that growth.
The mayor, which is the top executive in the county, a guy named Judd Matheny,
had been very pro-growth and was ready to turn the county into lots of subdivisions,
lots of development, lots of businesses.
He was ready for that to happen.
I mean, obviously, covering the growth in the South,
you see development everywhere, and farms are being converted into subdivisions all the time.
But in Coffey County... the drive for growth took a sudden turn.
Last spring, Matheny died unexpectedly, and with him, the momentum behind development.